The growth in data transmitted over wireless and cable networks has been driving consolidation of broadband operators, and creating a highly competitive global broadband service provision market. “Broadband operator” means an operator of a high-speed network that offers data transfer services over one or more types of networks (e.g.: mobile networks and other wireless networks, wired networks, or a combination of the preceding). “Broadband service” includes content delivered over a network; the network may be wired, wireless, cable, DSL, or other digital communication systems, or any combination thereof.
Telephone, cable, satellite, and mobile network operators (collectively, “operators”) are evolving and becoming broadband service providers. Triple or quad operators means operators that provide three or four services, such as residential Internet service, residential phone service, residential television, and mobile data services, which may in turn, include voice, Internet, and television. Data usage over both wireless, DSL and cable networks around the world is growing. Operators may grow revenue by offering users a variety of services, and by reducing the cost of their network operation centers (“NOCs”) and cost of their data links. Today, operators are offering more services and applications, meaning managing larger NOCs, which in turn translates to higher operating costs for the operators and therefore lower average revenue per user (“ARPU”). Operators are looking for solutions that allow them to run smaller NOCs, offer services suited to users' profiles and the type of device that the user is using at the time (e.g.: television (“TV”), laptop computer, desktop computer, or smartphone).
Today, operators can often identify users are but it is difficult to know what type of content users want based on their context. “Context” includes information about the nature of the user and content, including: information that refers to the user's location; the type of device the user is using to access the network; the level of connectivity access the user has; the user state, which includes information such as whether the user is connected to the network using a mobile or wired connection; whether the user is accessing the network from home or while traveling (e.g.: on vacation or on a business trip); to which networks the user is connected; and the user's interests. User demand for accessing media-rich content in real time is growing; concurrently, the types of devices that used to view such media-rich content is also growing. Broadband networks resulted from the migration of multiple networks, each having different characteristics and operating as silo networks where devices, applications, and networks are tightly coupled. Typical broadband networks are designed based on the assumption that edge devices, such as user devices used to access content, are dumb terminals with little ability to run rich multimedia applications. Typical broadband networks were also designed under the assumption that traffic growth will remain linear, which has been an underestimate.
Conventional solutions to satisfying user demands for delivery of rich multimedia content in real-time has centered on a “core-centric” approach in which a centralized server resides within a NOC for each different type of network; an exemplary “core-centric” network 100 is depicted in FIG. 1. This means that if an operator is operating broadband networks to deliver TV content, residential Internet content and cellular phone content, then such operators would use three different NOCs, TV NOC 250, Internet NOC 350 and cellular NOC 450, respectively. In such a model an operator uses software and servers that offer functionality such as determining the automatic bit rate (“ABR”), providing content inspections, and providing personalization engines that are installed within each NOC. Challenges arise when employing these approaches when serving large numbers, e.g. millions of users; shortcomings associated with these approaches include scalability issues, accuracy issues and synchronization of collected information. As depicted in FIG. 1 a triple and quad player operator is managing multiple NOC 250, 350 and 450, and within each NOC is run the same set of services including video transcoding and transrating engines, content reformatting, caching and proxy services.
Three changes are simultaneously occurring with respect to broadband networks. The first relates to digital content. The amount of content available on the Internet is overwhelming for end users, even very technically savvy ones, and the amount of content is still growing exponentially. Market research reports indicate that the marketplace of digital content is expected to grow to $130 billion worldwide by 2011. This includes on-demand digital video streaming, television services such as video on demand (“VoD”), subscription video on demand (“SVoD”) and pay-per-view (“PPV”). Also included in this market is on-line video advertising, Internet protocol television (“IPTV”) and mobile TV. References to “television” or “TV” herein shall refer to any of the above listed streaming video services.
The second relates to the effect of a new generation of users and their needs. These new users (often referred to as “Millennials”, represent the most populous generation that has ever lived on this planet. They tend to be technology-centric, and both dependent on and aware of technology. On average, each spends over $100 per week on technology-oriented products and services and directly influences over 80% of the spending in the home. This is the generation that wants the right information suited to their needs and context, delivered in the least amount of time. This group of users are socially connected through their mobile phone, laptop and desktop computers, and are the driving force behind enabling connectivity through TV. This generation wants to have personalized content; namely, content that is available on their own terms rather than on the terms of service providers and operators. This is the generation that does not want to be bound to a particular location or device to access specific content. They like to be able to watch TV content on any device and location within and outside of the home and not just on a TV display. They also want to be able to access Internet content and/or social networking services such as Twitter on their TV display while watching TV. They are not only content consumers but also content generators and distributors.
The third relates to advancements in technology, and particularly advancements in customer premises equipment (“CPE”). A household often no longer just has a single TV display and a PC but may have multiple laptops and PCs, along with TV displays and mobile devices, such as smart phones, cellular phones, net books, electronic reading tools, notepads, portable music and video players that users have and use at their homes (collectively, referred to herein as “user devices”). Additionally, users often have access to other user devices such as home residential gateways, set-top-boxes, routers, Wi-Fi access points and other networking equipment, and the use and availability of such equipment is growing rapidly. These changes mean that content is no longer created, controlled and distributed by a specific organization, such as operators, but instead content can be produced by anyone within a network and either pushed to or requested by anyone within the network. Such content includes place shifted video content, multimedia streams, and personal digital content. Therefore, a centralized approach wherein content is always produced by a selected entity and then distributed to subscribers will no longer be effective due to variation between user interests and because many users wish to play a more active role in generating content. Additionally, to centralize all content being created for distribution also will not be effective due to the heavy network traffic that would result from distributing such content.
The prior art solutions available include one or more of the following shortcomings. One shortcoming is their inability to authorize and authenticate a user by detecting the user's identity, the device that the user is using to access content, and the network over which the user is transferring content (e.g.: cellular phone network, cable television network, etc.). Another shortcoming is their inability to detect the user's proximity to a network node that has the desired content. Yet another shortcoming is their inability to allow one or more users to concurrently access pre-recorded content available on a server located at a user's home using a variety of different types of mobile devices, over a variety of network types, and/or over any supported native transport layer and application layer protocol that natively exists on the mobile device.
Another set of shortcoming include the inability to simultaneously serve multiple users through a single CPE while supporting multiple user devices through multiple network connections; reformatting content based on the format needs of the user devices that are being used to access the content; transferring content for the user devices based on the user devices' supported receive mechanism (e.g.: live stream, file download, flash player); and/or transferring, transcoding and transrating content based on the user devices' supported players and protocols, such as standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Real-Time Transfer Protocol (RTP), RTP Control Protocol (RTCP), or proprietary third party protocols.
Yet another shortcoming is their inability to dynamically, using real-time and/or system-based (no human interaction) pre-processing, multiplex live incoming TV (from cable, IPTV broadcast, IPTV peer-to-peer, satellite, mobile, or other sources) streams with other types of content (e.g.: one or more of picture, text, video, and audio) from one or more of the Internet, local storage, and the cloud of nodes, into a single stream.
Yet another shortcoming is their inability to dynamically, using real-time and/or system-based (no human interaction) pre-processing, multiplex recorded multimedia content (from, for example, TV, Digital Video Disc (DVD), VoD, the Internet) in any format with other types content from one or more of the Internet, local storage, and the cloud of nodes, into a single stream.
Another shortcoming is the inability to dynamically provide selective heterogeneous content multiplexing based on a set of rules defined statically or based on dynamic conditions. A further shortcoming is the inability to provide live TV tuner sharing between serving nodes (“SNs”) when one SN (Guest SN) can receive content in any format that is coming directly from any source to a local SN. A “serving node” is any piece of hardware suitably configured to act as a server to store and distribute content to one or more user devices, and includes suitably configured CPEs.
Yet another shortcoming is their inability to create/manage/control multiple accounts on a SN to access content, watch live or recorded content, request that content be recorded, share content, tag video clips, record video clips, watch clips based on tags, and/or send specific tags. A further shortcoming is their inability to dynamically load an application, module, service, or process that could support a user's request for content or their inability to interact with a user's mobile device such that the mobile device becomes a control device for interacting with a TV. This would entail utilizing full native keyboard and mouse functionalities on the display that is being utilized, which is very different than a remote control application that runs on a mobile device. The latter requires a separate application running on mobile device e.g. a remote control application. A yet further shortcoming is their inability to process a task automatically on behalf of a user based on a series of inputs inserted statically and/or in combination with intelligent data gathering about the user's preferences and subsequently predicting the user's expectations and needs.
There have been attempts in the prior art to create a distributed network composed of a series of serving nodes, but these solutions are not efficient. For instance, the content must be available and stored in multiple formats compatible with the format acceptable by the user devices that are used to access the content. Also, the content inspection servers must be available in multiple nodes of the network and Automatic Bit Rate (ABR) servers must predict the type of device that users will use to access the content. Shortcomings associated with the above approach include some of the following.
Pre-Formatted Content Storage for any Type of Device
Users' preferences are very different from each other when they are outside of home and away from their big TV screen. Deciding on storing the type of content for possible access from outside of the home is therefore difficult. Also keeping multiple formats suitable for all potential user devices that may be used is not efficient. Typical user devices renew and update data displays very quickly and therefore repeatedly mining data and archiving different formats for possible access by different user devices is cumbersome, costly and inefficient.
Content Inspection
The data traffic path for the user is not always the same. The purpose of content inspection is to identify the user's interests. However, the user's interest is best determined based on user habits over a period of time and not solely based on a snapshot of the user's current content usage. Distributing content inspection over multiple network nodes provides a snapshot of the user's current usage based only on the current traffic flow. Storing all traffic flows, determining the user identity, synchronizing the information for a post content inspection process in order to inspect usage over a longer period of time requires large amounts of storage, and extensive processing time. This is highly costly and inefficient. Conventional means allow the type of content the user is looking at any given moment in time to be determined, rather than a long term view. Consequently, the real preferences of the user under different conditions cannot be predicted accurately.
Automatic Bit Rate (ABR) servers—The ABR servers predict the type of user device that users will use to access network content and the network conditions over which the content will be transferred. This is conventionally done by either a client installed on the user device that sends device and network information to the ABR servers or by relying on native feedback protocols such as RTCP.
Problems exist with both of these approaches. Using clients that send extra traffic over the network to report on network conditions is inefficient. Additionally, in such a solution the ABR pre-formats multiple copies of content based on different network conditions that are stored and can be sent to a user device, such as a mobile device. The client software determines which format, size and resolution of the content to display. This approach results in the following fundamental problems: a) a large server is required to store the different formats of content; b.) a fast CPU is required to process and change the format of content in real time to provide for the multiple formats for each user, especially when hundreds of thousands of users are connected; and c.) extra unnecessary traffic results from sending multiple copies of content in different formats to the user's device; as well as Predicting network conditions based on RTCP feedback does not provide enough accuracy.
In the prior art, a CPE only facilitates providing CPE specific and vertical functions, e.g. a CPE that only provides Set-top-Box functionality or a CPE that provides Internet connectivity functionality. Furthermore, in conventional methods the CPE has no role in content distribution functionality among subscribers while they are at home or outside using different methods of connectivity and in delivering content concurrently to different devices and/or users in parallel.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and system that improves on at least one of the deficiencies of the prior art.